Roger Reynolds’s Dream Mirror

Derived from the two solo guitar pieces, imAge/guitar and imagE/guitar, Dream Mirror feels like a forgotten memory. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds composed the electroacoustic piece for guitarist Pablo Gómez and computer musician Jaime Oliver, and the three artists came to the the Phillips on March 3 to perform the works in the midst of Howard Hodgkin’s large prints As Time Goes By (2009).

Reynolds says that in Dream Mirror the computer musician “generate(s) an organically evolving fabric of sound that acts both as a ‘setting’ against which the guitar spins out its materials, and also as a protagonist in itself.” The guitarist’s actions are both anticipated and remembered by the computer, violating our normal time perceptions and mimicking the reality of our dreams.

Click below to listen to an excerpt from Gómez and Oliver’s performance of Dream Mirror.